• In season now: May

    New this month: Asparagus! The food of gods... and carrots are back.

    Still in season from last month: cauliflower, chard, green cabbage, salad leaves, main-crop potatoes (from store), salad leaves, sea kale, spring greens, rhubarb

    Goodbye till next year to: Purple sprouting broccoli (sniff, sniff), leeks, stored parsnips, forced rhubarb

  • What I’m doing here

    This all started when I picked the first strawberries from my new allotment.

    I'd never been so enraptured or so excited by food. It was a shock to find that anything could taste so good.

    So what - I'd never had strawberries before?

    No - all the strawberries I'd had were shop-bought, like as not flown in from intensive growers in Spain or Chile, and eaten in winter when strawberries should be a distant summer memory.

    It revolutionised my thinking about the fresh food we eat every day. I started to wonder if you got the same amazing taste from all types of food grown and eaten in season. And then I decided to do something about it.

    The Year of Eating Seasonally is my little experiment to find out what it's really like not to have it all. The only fruit and veg I and my family are going to eat in 2008 will be what's growing in the ground at the time (or, in winter, what I can get out of store).

    I want to find out if the hungry gap is really as hungry as everyone says it is: whether you're really eating nothing but cabbage all winter; and whether you miss strawberries in December.

    Along the way I hope I'll save a few tons of carbon being released into the atmosphere on my behalf, as I won't be requiring those French beans flown from Chile, thanks very much. And I hope I'll be rediscovering what food can really taste like.

    If you have any comments, please feel free to post them anywhere you like - or you can email me at sallywhite@hotmail.com.

Origami cooking

Posted on February 21, 2008 by SallyGardener

Domestic goddess rating: 100% (fabulous seasonal cook today) Five-a-day: 5/5 Food miles: about 40

On the menu: Toast,  jam & juice (breakfast); cheese sandwich (lunch); scrunched-up paper pie & steamed savoy cabbage (supper)

It’s half-term week so at last I have time to cook properly. I kind of manage to fit in some decent cookery sessions during a school/work week as a rule, but it’s only really possible for the two or three evenings we have without school clubs (kids) or pressing deadlines (me). But school hols is an ideal time to try out new things.

So that’s just what I did. I’ve had some filo pastry in the freezer left over from something else for a while, so I cobbled together a few recipes I found which used root veg, added a couple of tweaks of my own and ended up with a confection which the kids instantly dubbed “scrunched-up paper pie” – mainly because that’s just what it looked like with those papery filo pastry ruffles on top. Fortunately tasted a lot better than paper – in fact, pretty damn good, if I say so myself. Another seasonal triumph!

Filed under: Cooking, Recipes, Seasonal eating, healthy eating | Tagged: , ,

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2 Responses

  1. Buy Caviar, on February 23rd, 2008 at 3:09 pm Said:

    Hi,
    The only thing i can say now is YUMMY,,, I like the way you are writing the posts .. these are really helpful !

  2. SallyGardener, on February 23rd, 2008 at 4:12 pm Said:

    thank you! :D

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